INDIVIDUAL AND HUMAN INTEREST IN ECONOMIC THEORY

The original epistemological sin of bourgeois economic theory is that it begins with the individual.
The fundamental question of economics is to define and determine value – the quidditas, the
whatness or essence of prices, what determines them – and its production and distribution. Yet, the
aspect of value that is in turn essential to economic enquiry is “exchange value” or “value in
exchange”. If indeed we wished to concentrate on human productive activity in terms of universal
human interest (here “inter-est” stands for the Latin phrase inter homines esse – being among
humans), then there would be no room for the concept of exchange value – quite simply because
there can be no “exchange” of productive activity between humanity taken as a whole, as a totality.
Exchange, and therefore also value in exchange, can exist only “between” human beings, taken
individually or in groups because only that way can the products of human activity “change hands”
or be ex-changed. But once human productive activity is reduced to the activity of sub-groups of
humanity, then clearly the ultimate unit of human productive activity becomes the individual. This is
so because once we begin to analyze human productive activity in terms of human sub-groups, then
the ultimate reference point for a universal economic theory can only be the individual – for the
evident reason that any theory based on human sub-groups would end up being peculiar and
restricted to the particular “sub-group” that we chose to analyze, be it a tribe or a nation or an
enterprise. Even the idea of a “theory of the firm”, first canvassed by Ronald Coase, can yield
interesting results but can never become the foundation for a comprehensive “theory” of economic
activity.

Thus it is that “exchange” of human productive activity becomes inevitably the original sin of
economic theory: - because by concentrating on the “ex-change” of human products between
individuals or groups, economic theory (a) wholly neglects the effects of human activity on our living
environment, on the ecosphere; and (b) it also introduces the notion of “private property” and
consequently of a “marketplace” where human products can be ex-changed. This is so because,
quite obviously, no “market” could exist without “exchange for value” and no “value in exchange”
would be conceivable without a legal entitlement to the human products that are exchanged in the
marketplace – without private property.

The full deleterious effect of this original sin of economic theory can be easily inferred because
through it our enquiry into human productive activity must necessarily neglect the interaction or
metabolism between this activity and its “object”, the eco-sphere or life-world of humans; and also
because this enquiry must take for granted as absolutely fundamental to its enterprise those very
“proprietary interests” – the laws that define and protect private property – without which no
“exchange’ of human products could ever take place “for value”! Yes, there could be exchange of
“gifts” or “presents” between human beings; but without legal rights to products, without private
property, such an exchange could never form the basis for the calculation of “value in exchange”
because gifts and present by definition (!) could never form the basis of systematic measurable
calculation!

Hence, the question arises of what it is exactly that we calculate when we ascribe a value to human
products – a value that forms the basis for the pricing of such products. Here it is that value in
exchange and corresponding prices must necessarily reduce human productive activity – which, as
we all know, is and must be infinitely variable and impossible to define or let alone to calculate – to a
“quantity” that can be so defined and calculated in a manner that must also be necessarily arbitrary
and entirely contingent, that is to say, entirely political in nature.
The vice of bourgeois economic theory – and a possible pitfall for liberal bourgeois political
institutions, including nation-states – is precisely this inability or ideological unwillingness to see
economic relations for what they are – political institutions. This is a vice principally because it leaves
liberal regimes, especially ones founded on parliamentary democracy, open to abuse by powerful
totalitarian regimes that use or abuse liberal market institutions to bolster and strengthen their
military-industrial complexes with the ultimate aim to undermine, subvert and eventually dominate
societies based on liberal market capitalist institutions.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the specific and historically unprecedented case of the Han
Chinese Dictatorship – unprecedented first because of the ruthless will-to-power of this Dictatorship
single-mindedly intent on extending its dominion over the entire globe, and second because its
existing dominion over one fifth of humanity (over a billion people) gives it the human resources to
exploit trade with liberal market economies through mercantilist exploitation of trade that allows it
to accumulate product resources and know-how that it turns immediately and purposefully toward
the implementation of its global imperialist and genocidal project. It is entirely obvious that this
project is reliant, first, in abusing market rules of exchange (which, once more, are not “natural” or
“objective” but entirely political in nature, and therefore open to manipulation) with the sole
purpose of acquiring sufficient military and industrial power to be able – and here is the second
point – to defeat and subjugate eventually those liberal market economies whose “market rules” of
trade and exchange it is forced momentarily to observe to reach its final goal of world domination.

Clearly, whilst it is essentially true that Western parliamentary democracies are ready and willing to
let their productive systems and trade to operate according to broadly-agreed “market rules”, the
same cannot be said of the Han Chinese Dictatorship – and that for the obvious reason that its
totalitarian rule and subjugation of its own people and other conquered territories (Tibet, Xinjiang,
Inner Mongolia, and now projection over Taiwan and the South China Sea) is clearly inconsistent
with the operation of bourgeois liberal capitalist market rules within and outside of the existing Han
Chinese Empire.

WHY THE GLOBAL LEFT IS RETREATING

We say “global Left” to indicate the Left as a historical progressive movement not just nationally but
also across the globe. Of course, many divergencies and contradictions exist between the aims and
policies of individual national left-wing parties and movements, on one side, and the more properly
“global” aims and policies of the historical Left.

I wish to make two points tersely: first, so far as the analysis and critique of capitalism that the Left
advances broadly, most of it implanted on Karl Marx’s original work, there can be no doubt that
these critical analyses are broadly correct and still apply to capitalism as we know it at present. Only
on one respect – which we have highlighted frequently here – is Marxism inapplicable to the present
capitalist reality. Like all other “economists” Classical and Neoclassical, Marx always saw human
reproductive and productive activity as a matter of “exchanges” between human beings inter eos or
humanity as a whole inter se. No economists or critics of economics (Marx saw himself as a
debunking “critic” of “economic science” or “political economy”) have ever considered that one
aspect of human industry, and especially of capitalist industry, would entail the eventual destruction
of the ecosphere – which is what we are witnessing presently. In other words, far from being limited
to “exchange value” or the distribution of resources among and between human beings, the critique
of economics must now start with the pernicious effects that capitalism has on our environment –
something that involves the analysis of “use values” as against “exchange values”. All economists to
date have assumed that use values were “scarce” in terms of their pricing in inter-human exchange.
What we have learned now is that capitalism’s gravest deleterious fault is its tendency to consume
and destroy all available resources or use values to the point that the very survival of humanity is
imperiled.

So much for the critical analysis of capitalism on the part of the historical Left. The other aspect of
the Left concerns not just the critique of capitalism, which is a negative stance, but also its positive
advancement of historical humanitarian and progressive aims, goals and policies. It is in this regard
at least that the global Left is failing catastrophically as we have asserted vehemently here
repeatedly and even ad nauseam. What is wrong with the global Left at present is that whilst its
historical “values” remain irrefutably unobjectionable – freedom, peace, equality, progress -, the
policies that it proposes to implement these goals and values are woefully inadequate and indeed
entirely counterproductive when they are not also irrational.

This sad state of affairs is especially evident when it comes to matters concerning “globalization” –
by which we mean generally the movement of resources and people across countries and regions,
the rapid implementation of colossal and sweeping technological changes, and the individualization
of political goals (what is called “identity politics” where “the political” becomes exclusively
“personal”, as in “the personal is political”, whereas in harsh reality it is the political that is
ineluctably and catastrophically personal!).

In one specific regard the Left is especially and contemptibly culpable:- and that is in its inability to
see that although the capitalist bourgeoisie pretends to be “conservative”, it is so only in ideology
but never (!) in practice! Far from being conservative, the bourgeoisie destroys all communities,
values, even nations in its truculent path! And yet it uses the ideology of “conservation” as the party
of stability just at the same time as the global Left is absolutely blindly hell-bent on pushing
“progress” and “growth” at any cost as if they could only bring happiness and fulfilment to
humanity!

The absurdity of this lies in the paradox that whilst the bourgeoisie is busy destroying the daily
stability of proletarians the world over, it is the Left that pushes the very ideology of destructive
creation masked as bleary-eyed progressivism whilst the bourgeoisie (of, what madness!) is busy
pretending to be the passionate preserver of the status quo! Thus, whilst the Left keeps invoking its
humanitarian values to facilitate the migration of billions of indigent masses from Asia and Africa to
the advanced capitalist countries, to the immediate detriment and destruction of proletarian living
standards in the West (!), it is the bourgeoisie that hypocritically and ideologically professes to fight
a ceaseless and defiant battle to stop such destructive and abominable migration of false refugees! It
is thus that the Left is completely hoodwinked and “taken from behind” by the capitalist bourgeoisie.
Of course, the same goes for the environmental fight where the Left proposes to destroy the living
standards of workers in the West while all the while the worst abusers of the environment are those
very “emerging economies” whose overpopulation the Western bourgeoisie aids and abets with the
full aid of local bourgeoisies, and whose “refugees” Western workers are supposed to welcome into
their societies with open arms!

As we have stressed repeatedly here, the sooner the Left realizes that the twin evils of capitalism are
(a) overpopulation in Asia and Africa and (b) overconsumption across the globe, the sooner we shall
be able to stop the collapse of left-wing politics the world over. If not, we shall simply be condemned
to see our planet destroyed by the likes of Trump, Johnson, Le Pen, Salvini, Orban and what not – to
leave aside, of course, the greatest usurpers such as the Han Chinese, the nationalist Hindus of India,
the appallingly misogynist Muslims and so on and so forth. Cheers.